Time (6). The spirals of our lives
Circling, circling....
Last week, in the final piece of my five-part thought experiment on time, I realised that I was still thinking about living systems as moving forwards; the past behind them, the future in front. I had broken up the idea of a single, chronological line with my three-dimensional, multi-stranded weave, but it was all still moving in a direction.
I attempted to reframe this by going back to the idea in the Indian tradition of time as circular, looking at cycles, seasons and rhythms.
In my own life I’ve spent decades unconsciously embodying a strong sense of forward-moving impetus. I’ve re-invented myself so many times, and somehow that reinventing always seemed to involve a severing from the previous incarnation. Always a sense of moving forward, moving on.
In my art, I was always anticipating the next emergent mystery, keen to find out what was going to appear, scarcely stopping to take a breath. It’s taken many months to slow this down, to start to consider the ways in which life more often moves rhythmically; to allow it to trace cycles and spirals and arcs, and accept that sometimes the impetus has energy for movement, and sometimes it seeks stillness.
Learning this is itself a cycle; something that I feel I’ve experienced over and over again, and which somehow I still have to keep encountering.
When I stop to think about it, I realise that my personal history is in reality patterned much more by cyclical repetitions than by my focus and intentions, even as I’m being exhorted to plan and move in ‘straightforward’ ways. I seem to have to keep learning new versions of things I thought I had dealt with long ago, as I unconsciously run my own repeating rhythms over and over in different ways. Perhaps we’re all living examples of the fact that this is how life itself moves, how ‘development’ actually proceeds.
Duane Toops wrote recently about the tension between his intentional straight lines and a different, cyclical way of working that he found was trying to emerge:
The perfectionist in me likes to think and work linearly. Perhaps, even chronologically. Forward motions in a particular direction. Progress, clearly and sequentially delineated. I haven’t been in the habit of referring to previous methods or previous work. Something about it feels like moving backwards. Like regression. But lately I’ve found myself revisiting old ways of working that I haven’t considered or thought about for years. The challenge has been to allow myself to do it.
Reminding myself that the rhythms of the world have always been seasonal, cyclical. Always a matter of return.
In another note, Duane quotes Cecil Touchon saying something that, despite all of our self-flagellation and expectations of progress, we know well about the patterns of creative work:
Artists, writers, musicians, dancers – we don’t just work with materials; we work with timing, attention, and deep sensitivity. We often walk a path that’s more intuitive than intellectual, more meandering than straightforward.
Cecil Touchon, in Duane Toops, 13/6/25
In this outcomes-obsessed, goal-oriented, productivity-based world, many of us have absorbed messages about an expectation that we should always know what we’re doing, and where we’re going. We feel, implicitly, even if not always consciously, that we should be working consistently and constantly, and that we should regularly able to recognise clear achievements, one after another. And we often expect ourselves to be able to do this repeatedly, endlessly. Somehow straight-line, progress-assuming thinking has seeped into us, however hard we’ve tried to resist it, and the ‘constant presence required’ dictates of internet algorithms have not helped one bit.
And yet, in our actual reality, we live in a spiralling, perpetually-emerging now; continually coming back to ourselves, but in a new form.
I had thought that my writing here was a chronological story, that I was tracking slices of time laid out from left to right, one leading on to another. But what I keep learning is that all of it is here with me, in every moment. Mattancherry is part of my fabric, as is the temple at Belur, as are the jain murals at Sravanabelagola; they shape my eyes as I look out onto a Scottish sea, as I wander around Edinburgh art galleries, looking for something I can relate to.
Love this one...
Ahhhhh yes thanks for writing this. A really timely reminder x